If you loved how the Wildfire team clinically teased apart the properties of the Andromeda organism—pH sensitivities, coagulation effects, the lab protocols in Levels I–V—you’ll click with the way Blindsight dissects first contact aboard the artifact Rorschach. Siri Keeton’s crew runs brutally rigorous tests while a predator-genius captain, Jukka Sarasti, pushes them into ever riskier experiments. The book’s bioscience, cognitive theory, and instrument readouts scratch the same itch as the Wildfire autopsies and culture trials, but against a mind-bendingly alien biology.

As the Wildfire team traced the SCOOP satellite to Piedmont and pieced together Andromeda’s transmission vectors—right up to the nuclear self-destruct countdown—this novel follows Detective Miller and Captain Holden as they unravel Julie Mao’s disappearance and the spread of the protomolecule from Eros Station. The forensic trail, conflicting agencies, and stepwise revelations echo the way Jeremy Stone and Mark Hall worked the problem under crushing time pressure.

If you were drawn to the Wildfire ensemble—Stone, Leavitt, Burton, and Hall pooling expertise inside that hermetic lab—The Swarm gives you a larger, global team: marine biologist Sigur Johanson, whale expert Leon Anawak, and others confronting coordinated oceanic anomalies that may be an alien intelligence. It has the same multi-specialist problem-solving dynamic you enjoyed in the Piedmont crisis, scaled up to a planetary investigation.

Crichton’s use of lab reports, diagrams, and Wildfire memos made Andromeda feel terrifyingly real. Illuminae leans fully into that dossier style—emails, chat logs, after-action reports, ship schematics—while a biocontagion tears through two refugee ships and an unstable AI complicates containment. If those appendices and incident logs in The Andromeda Strain pulled you in, this document-driven thriller will do the same at warp speed.

Remember the Wildfire countdown and Hall’s split-second decisions under the Odd-Man Hypothesis? Upgrade delivers that same urgent, problem-solving momentum as Logan Ramsay races to counter a gene-editing scheme set to reshape humanity. The molecular details, containment hurdles, and iterative testing mirror the way the team isolated Andromeda’s quirks in the lab—only now the lab is the whole world, and the bomb is in the genome.